


heartbeat

by amorremanet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Bars and Pubs, Character Study, Depressed Derek Hale, Depression, Derek Hale is Bad at Feelings, Derek Has Issues, Derek is Derek, Ficlet, Gen, Headcanon, Heartbeats, Hurt Derek, Isolation, Loneliness, Lonely Derek, M/M, Melancholy, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Slice of Life, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Tumblr Memes, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Derek sneers down at his whisky. "Healthy is for dying people. I wish I only lived at night."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solvecoagula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solvecoagula/gifts).



> Originally posted on tumblr [here](http://amorremanet.tumblr.com/post/79010867813/derek-900).

A heartbeat unto itself, the whole club throbs around Derek — and he likes it that way. He wouldn't go anywhere where the noise would let him think.

The DJ has the bass cranked up, so every beat booms for all it's worth. The dance-floor is a writhing mess of bodies all tangling and untangling, limbs into limbs and hips against hips and mouths against mouths, whetting at each other like fucking knives. The different laughs peppering this place all have a certain unique rhythm to them, and they grate like aural sandpaper but they're better than listening to nothing.

They're better than Derek wasting the night back and his and Laura's shitty flat in Williamsburg, only hearing her heartbeat and the rise and fall of her breath, the white noise outside their window and paper scraping against paper as she turns the pages of whatever heady academic book she's pilfered from the library this week and Derek turns the pages of  _Blood and Chocolate_ for the umpteen thousandth time.

Laughter scraping at his ears like  _her_  nails up his back. Laughter like  _her_  lips along his ear and her throaty whisper crawling along his skin — it's always preferable to the silence, if not by much. Derek would even rather what he gets from Laura when she ruffles his hair and points out that the book isn't even halfway accurate to how any kind of wolf pack works (much less a werewolf pack) and Derek's read it enough times that he has entire sections memorized. It's better than hearing nothing and having to stare down the darkness. It's better than the ache he can't explain…

Even curling his hand around his double Jack, trying to lose himself in this heartbeat club because the liquor won't do anything but singe a bit on the way down, Derek's better off here than at the apartment or somewhere else that's quiet. Same as he does every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and sometimes throughout the week besides.

The literal heartbeats up and down the bar stand out for Derek, too, all of them going at different paces, to different effects — there's one old white guy in a slicked up suit, sipping dry vodka martinis and twisting his garish silver pinky ring; he probably won't last the month with that stop-and-start arrhythmia. There's an olive-skinned woman hunched over a journal, scratching away at the paper, heart racing even though she barely moves outside of jiggling her ankle and jerking her hand across the page. There's a plainclothes cop at the end of the bar and her heartbeat's graveyard still as she puts the moves on a middle school science teacher — the cop's not off-duty, so she really shouldn't, but she leans in toward Ms. So and So  _just so_  and hisses an invitation back to her place into the teacher's mouth.

There's the beanpole bartender with his blue plaid shirt, his Buddy Holly glasses, and his brown mop-top with the Beatle bangs, and there's the way his pulse spikes when he brings over another double Jack and "accidentally" brushes his fingertips across the back of Derek's hand.

Derek sighs as he looks up from the bar and its polished oak surface. He squints at this guy who only knows him by his drink order and the name on his credit card, and he hears this guy's heart fluttering like a hummingbird, watches as his cheeks and neck flush pink. When he grins, his lips wobble, all a mess of nerves, and his misaligned teeth gleam like moonlight under this place's only hints of light.

"You come here often," he says. Not a question — not the way it would usually get played, and fumbling over rolling up his sleeves, he chuckles a bit at his own irony. "You have a name?"

"You know my name," Derek points out and wrinkles his nose. "You've seen it before. We're in here together often enough. And the other night, you wrote it on my napkin. Like a Starbucks order."

The guy's grin falters, then comes back bigger. "Yeah… yeah, okay. You got me there, Derek. I just thought…" He shrugs, lets his grin slip into a wry curl of his lips. "I just thought it'd be nice to hear you say it. …I'm Avery, by the way. Not that you're asking."

"I'm not." Derek huffs. "If you want to come back to my place when your shift's over, I don't need to know your name."

This, finally, gives Avery pause. Furrowing his brow and tilting his head like Derek's a painting hung up at the MOMA that might make more sense if it's slightly sideways, he takes a moment. The gears turning in his head couldn't be more obvious if they ran up to Derek in the middle of Times Square and got in his face, waving their arms and shoving a camera at him and screaming at him for ruining a picture he didn't even know was being taken.

Tourists are why he can't go anywhere in this fucking city, and why he sometimes misses California. That, and they almost never put up with so much godawful  _snow_  in Beacon Hills.

After a while of fumbling over different attempted starts, Avery says, "You don't… Are you one of those love 'em and leave 'em guys? Or one of the smarmy NYU queer studies guys who doesn't date like the rest of us because it's heteronormative? One of those guys who's all desperately clinging to our big gay past and doesn't believe in more than anonymous hookups? Garden variety commitment-phobic? Stop me if I guess it."

Derek shrugs. "Bisexual."

"What?"

" _Bisexual_ ," he says again, louder and enunciating more clearly. "I can't be clinging to a big gay past because I'm not gay, I'm bisexual."

"Oh." Briefly, Derek hopes Avery turns out to be one of the assholes who won't sleep with him over this point — but Avery just shrugs. "That's cool, my ex-boyfriend was bi, too. And his sister. And their cousin. So, why don't you do the sex with names thing, then?"

_Because having sex with names creates false expectations and it's kind of part of how I got my entire family set on fire._

"Because I have deep-set trust issues and a chronic need for affection that manifests itself in constantly seeking out sexual encounters. But I can't let anyone in because of the deep-set trust issues, so it's better if I don't even bother pretending like this will go somewhere before I fuck someone or let them fuck me. So, I don't even bother with names."

Deadpan, sounding almost perfectly like some of the drivel-laden pop psychology self-help books that he picked up from the last girl Laura started seeing, Derek rolls his eyes. More at himself than Avery — more at himself than at the half-vacant, half-suspicious gaping that he gets from Avery, the look that isn't sure whether or not Derek's being full of shit right now — but the sentiment here could go both ways.

 _Just like me_ , he thinks, and can't even manage to smirk at his own antics. Usually, he'd at least give himself a chuckle.

"Look, does it really matter why I sometimes have sex with other people anonymously?" Derek says. "I'm clean, I have condoms in my wallet and more back at my place, and I know  _your_  name. So do you want to come back to my place tonight or not?"

Avery considers that for a moment — down the bar, the cop shouts at him that she needs a refill, so can he quit flirting on the job already (which is a fucking laugh) — and since time is of the essence, he nods. Tongues at his lips.

"I get off at one-thirty," he says, leaning in, conspiratorially close. "Unless you're one of those abominably healthy-faking drunks who likes to get a good night's sleep and go for a light five-k before breakfast."

Derek sneers down at his whisky. "Healthy is for dying people. I wish I only lived at night."

Avery laughs at that, all earnest and warm, but he can't stay. Duty calls. As he wanders off to get another round for the cop and the middle school science teacher, Derek sighs over the rim of his Jack, then throws the whole thing down and  _hisses_ , hard, and drags his teeth along his lower lip. He bites down hard enough to feel it, if not hard enough to puncture the skin.

And he deserves it, too, for fucking up as badly as he has just now, all for the sake of what? Some sticky fumble around the sheets with a guy he doesn't know?

Never goes well, taking the bartender home. Or any of the other regular patrons at any given place. They'll have sex. It might be nice. Maybe even good. But then Derek's gonna need to find somewhere new to drink, lest Avery start getting ideas like the three people before him did, or worse? Lest Derek get any ideas about where things with Avery might be going. Where they could ever,  _ever_  go.

Glancing up and down the bar, Derek sighs. Damn, he really liked it here.

**Author's Note:**

> Hilariously, this started for a tumblr meme to the tune of, "give me a ship/character and pick a number between 1 and X where X = the number of songs on one of my playlists, and I'll write you a five-sentence ficlet."
> 
> This is hilarious because the song that inspired this ficlet was Eddie Murphy's, "Party All The Time." [Yeah really](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDbpzjbXUZI).


End file.
